Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is Mastro’s only live auction all year, and like the company’s three annual “premier” auctions, where the average lot goes for about $5,000, this one’s for high rollers. The minimum bid on the cheapest lot is $2,500, and 19 lots start at $20,000 or more. Don’t expect to see a copy of that 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some lines in Dawn Turner Trice’s Monday morning column in the Tribune on the NIU killings dug into me: “By many accounts there were few warning signs. . . . Days later, it’s still frustrating to not have a motive. . . . ‘People who can talk about their problems typically don’t act out their problems. . . ....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Top blown story: The number of Iraqi casualties of the war in Iraq. Estimates have ranged up to 1.2 million, but nobody knows for sure and the media have shown little interest in finding out, according to Project Censored, much less how many have been civilians killed by American troops. “The dominant narrative on Iraq—that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility—is ill conceived,” it claims....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Thursday at 6 PM, the Siskel Film Center will screen The Nine Muses as part of its Conversations at the Edge series. The movie is as much of a mosaic as an essay, drawing from dozens of classic literary sources to address the experience of emigration. Director John Akomfrah says his central subject are the immigrants from former British colonies who came to the UK in the decades following World War II, but Muses also considers journeys in classical mythology and present-day explorations of the Alaskan wilderness....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In this week’s paper I previewed an exciting concert happening Thursday night in Millennium Park: the fantastic drummer Dana Hall will be reconvening his Black Fire project, which plays the music of pianist and composer Andrew Hill, with a lineup twice as large as the one he used to debut the endeavor last year at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The studios initially flipped out, blocking the release of their films, delaying FCC approval and sending the Zenith subsidiary stock tumbling (Daily Tribune, May 26, 1950). Then the studios took a familiar “we’ll wait and see but it’s going to fail anyway” attitude: “[Paramount Pictures president Barney] Balaban told Paramount shareholders at their annual meeting in New York that the company, after giving careful study to every aspect of phonevision, doubts its basic technical and economic feasibility....

The only thing sacred in journalism any longer is the future, and the way to get there looks more like a treasure map than a road map. Anyone able to shout with authority, “Here’s where we dig!” is taken seriously, and anyone who asks, “Why there?” becomes part of the problem. But Malatia’s a visionary and a gambler. Vocalo began as a separate Web site, vocalo.org, and a separate frequency, 89....

Each of Halcyon Theatre’s previous two Alcyone Festivals showcased plays by a number of women. This time around it’s dedicated entirely to the work of a just one female playwright, Maria Irene Fornes. Though not as well known as she should be, Fornes, who turns 80 this year, has had a huge impact on since the 1960s. The influence of her work—with its fragmented storytelling, profound empathy, clear yet undidactic politics, and healthy dose of weird—can be seen in the plays of such disparate writers as Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, and Nilo Cruz....

Sasha Morgan Pissed Jeans Many music fans are already planning strategies to scoop up that Trey Anastasio 7″ picture disc when local shops open their doors for Record Store Day on Saturday, but let’s not forget that the people that make the sounds captured on those records often serve up that shit onstage year-round. So save a few pennies to catch some live music this coming weekend as well. (You can also catch a lot of those sounds on celluloid—er, video—this weekend at the annual Chicago International Movies & Music Festival....

Michael York stars as King Arthur in this new touring revival of the 1961 musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, based on T.H. White’s classic novel The Once and Future King. York, a classically trained Shakespearean actor, brings boyish charm and tragic grandeur to his portrayal of the ruler whose vision of a civilized, law-abiding society is compromised by his pain at the romance between his wife and his greatest knight....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Given the shrinking of its population, it is possible that Europe, or considerable parts of it, will turn into a cultural theme park, a kind of Disneyland on a level of a certain sophistication for well-to-do visitors from China and India, something like Brugge, Venice, Versailles, Stratford-on-Avon, or Rothenburg ob der Tauber on a larger scale. Some such parks already exist; when the coal mines in the Ruhr were closed down, the Warner Brothers Movie World was opened in Dortmund....

I also know parents who let their kids miss school so they could all fly to another town for a Bruce Springsteen concert. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In other words, although it’s commendable to have perfect attendance, there are all sorts of reason—good or bad—to miss a day or two of school. As hard as this may be to believe, I’m skeptical that Mayor Emanuel’s being completely truthful when he insists that he believes children should never, ever, ever miss a day of school....

Dried shrimp, or shrimp that have been salted and dried in the sun, are often used in Asian, African, and Cajun cuisines, as well as in Carlos Gaytan’s native Mexico. He’s no stranger to the ingredient, but he’s not sure whether Bill Kim knew that when he chose it: “I’m assuming that he thought that we don’t do anything with dried shrimp in Mexico—or probably he was just being really nice to me....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I read comments like Cassidy’s, I wonder: What era does she live in? Anyone who claims in 2013 to have kids who are actively shamed for having unmarried parents—statistically far more likely to be the case these days—is being hyperbolic. Her words are, of course, the rhetoric of a practiced politician. But they do speak to the deep social conservatism in which gay marriage comes wrapped....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The descent of roughly two million people on what is really not that big a city was doomed to be a logistical nightmare (a “clustercluster,” as our bus driver Vince called it), and Hideout owners Tim and Katie Tuten saw it as their patriotic duty to contribute to it. So on Sunday morning they packed two buses with musicians, staff, Hideout regulars, and canvassers from Interchange, the organization that cooperated with the club to organize Obama fund-raisers and canvassing car pools....

Toronto’s Ron Sexsmith has such an unassuming way with a melodic hook that it’s easy to take his sublime craftsmanship for granted. Though at this point (he’s in his early 40s) it seems unlikely he’ll ever become a big marquee name, he’s one of the strongest pop songwriters of the past decade. Time Being (released in the U.S. by Ironworks, a label owned by Kiefer Sutherland and Jude Cole) reunites him with producer Mitchell Froom, who oversaw three of his finest earlier albums, and on it Sexsmith stays true to form: he’s an eternal romantic, and sees love as the one thing that can break through the misery and pain of everyday life....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McMahon edits the Tribune‘s Perspective section and he’s a head of the committee assigned to reinvent the Saturday paper, which is one of several committees created to reimagine the Tribune from top to bottom. We’re supposed to see this leaner, hungrier newspaper in September, but McMahon’s work will be done a lot sooner. The end of the month? I asked, for I’d heard the new Saturday Tribune would be rolled out by then....

This is Shoenice. There’s a lot of weird shit out there on the Internet. So much so that if you were asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen on the Internet?,” you’d probably have a really difficult time thinking of an answer. But I’m pretty set on accepting Shoenice as the Web’s most bizarre. There’s not a whole lot of information out there on Shoenice, but I have gathered this much: Christopher “Shoenice” Schewe is a mid-40s Gulf War veteran who has made a name on YouTube posting videos of himself eating strange things....

I likely would never have had the occasion to visit Lake Forest—that “bastion of gentility and reserve“—if not for the gravitational pull of the town’s annual rummage sale. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two bags of clothes, three massive brass planters, and $85 later, I could have departed Lake Forest perfectly content. Then I got slightly lost and happened upon an ivy-clad, Tudor-style relic: the Deer Path Inn, designed in the 1920s by architect William C....

It was like a dream. I came home to find two guys checking names at the front door. They found me listed on a clipboard, gave me a lanyard with a credential showing I belonged, and waved me upstairs. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Living in a Wrigley Field rooftop apartment undeniably had an element of boyhood romance. Bleacher tickets, then $3.50, were sold only on the day of the game....